Italian Supreme Court President Writes Book Linking Bilderberg to Operation Gladio and the CIA

“The Bilderberg Group is behind the so-called ‘strategy of tension,’ and therefore the massacres,” says Ferdinando Imposimato, Honorary President of the Supreme Court as he makes references to a document written more than 40 years ago – and which was almost lost- during the promotion of his new book, “La repubblica delle stragi impunite,” which translates to “The republic where massacres go unpunished.”

NAPLES – “The Bilderberg Group is one of the leading organizations behind the strategy of tension, and therefore the (Operation Gladio) massacres.” This statement is not just mentioned by bloggers or conspiracy theorists, or even Beppe Grillo, but Ferdinando Imposimato, Honorary President of the Supreme Court. The former magistrate, who would be proclaimed by the ‘5-Star Movement’ as one of the possible presidential candidates, speaks in Naples during the promotion of his new book.

His words are very clear. “We found the truth about the massacres,” he says in an interview with a journalist. “There has been complicity between the state -or factions of the state- and the Mafia, as well as (black ops) terrorism and freemasonry. These elements came together during Operation Gladio, and consist of multiple international organizations, controlled by the CIA. This is a proven fact, ” he says. The purpose of their actions was to destabilize public order and stabilize the political power.

The 40-year-old document

In his book, Ferdinando Imposimato also speaks of the Bilderberg Group, mentioned in a document written by Emilio Alessandrini in 1967 -more than 40 years ago. “In this document, which I have quoted literally, it is mentioned that the Bildenberg Group is one of the biggest promoters of the strategy of tension, and therefore also behind the massacres. Here’s what Bilderberg does: It rules the world and democracies in an invisible way, influencing the democratic development of these countries.”

It is important for Italians to know this, for some of their countrymen are among the members of this group and the Trilateral Commission, like of Mario Monti, the current Prime Minister, John Elkann, Chairman of Fiat Group, Pier Francesco Guarguaglini, former president of Finmeccanica or Marco Tronchetti Provera, chairman of Pirelli, also Enrico Letta, vice secretary of the Democratic Party.

OAKLAND, California—Lawsuits challenging government secrecy have fared pretty terribly in the post-9/11 era, with the most recent example being the Supreme Court’s ruling last month that a group of journalists and activists have no right to sue over the FISA spying law.

Only a few cases of this sort are left, including two Bay Area lawsuits being pushed forward by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. One is the San Francisco case over NSA wiretapping, which the government is trying to shut down using the “state secrets” privilege. The other is EFF’s case demanding to see documents about how the government is interpreting Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.

It isn’t just activists that are concerned, either. In 2009, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said the government’s use of “Section 215 is unfortunately cloaked in secrecy. Some day that cloak will be lifted, and future generations will ask whether our actions today meet the test of a democratic society.” In 2011, two US Senators, Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO), publicly voiced their concerns, too, suggesting the government had a pretty wild interpretation of what it was allowed to do under the PATRIOT Act. “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry,” Wyden toldThe New York Times.

Florida man deserved to be arrested inside the Supreme Court building last year for wearing a jacket painted with “Occupy Everything,” and is lucky he was only apprehended on unlawful entry charges, the Department of Justice says.

The President Barack Obama administration made that assertion in a legal filing in response to a lawsuit brought by Fitzgerald Scott, who is seeking $1 million in damages for his January 2012 arrest inside the Supreme Court building. He also wants his arrest record expunged.

What’s more, the authorities said the former Marine’s claim that he was protected by the First Amendment bolsters the government’s position (.pdf) because the Supreme Court building’s public interior is a First Amendment-free zone.

Fitzgerald was not disturbing anybody, but was repeatedly told by court staff to leave the building or remove the coat. Outside the building, about a dozen “Occupy” protesters were arrested.

Inside, Fitzgerald was handcuffed and arrested for unlawful entry as he was viewing an exhibit on slavery.

Here is the District of Columbia’s ‘unlawful entry’ statute:

Any person who, without lawful authority, shall enter, or attempt to enter, any public building, or other property, or part of such building, or other property, against the will of the lawful occupant or of the person lawfully in charge thereof or his or her agent, or being therein or thereon, without lawful authority to remain therein or thereon shall refuse to quit the same on the demand of the lawful occupant, or of the person lawfully in charge thereof or his or her agent, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not more than $1,000, imprisonment for not more than 6 months, or both.

To be sure, the courts have upheld convictions of those wearing inappropriate clothing inside the high court’s building — once in 2011 for individuals wearing orange shirts that said “Shut Down Guantanamo” and in 2007 for protesters wearing orange jump suits and black hoods — all in violation of the so-called “Display Clause.”

The Obama administration said Wednesday that Scott could also have been arrested and charged with violating the Display Clause, which makes it “unlawful to parade, stand, or move in processions or assemblages in the Supreme Court Building or grounds, or to display in the Building and grounds a flag, banner, or device designed or adapted to bring into public notice a party, organization, or movement.”

“It also bears noting that, while plaintiff was initially charged with violating the unlawful entry statute, his conduct also violated the Display Clause of section 6135, and he could just as easily have been charged with an independent violation of that statute as well,” the Obama administration said.

In 2008, Congress passed the “FISA Amendments Act,” or FAA. This expanded the government’s ability to use electronic surveillance on people located abroad—and, apparently, any Americans they’re speaking to. A lawsuit was quickly filed by an array of civil rights groups, labor unions, and media organizations, including Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, The Nation magazine, the Service Employees International Union, and an international group of criminal defense lawyers.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was originally designed to allow spying on the communications of foreign powers. But after the September 11 attacks, FISA courts were authorized to target a wide array of international communications, including communications between Americans and foreigners. While it’s tough to know exactly what kinds of communications are being picked up under the FAA rules (because it’s all been kept secret), the evidence suggests there has been widespread dragnet-style surveillance of phone calls originating in the US.

Who controls the rights to the seeds planted in the ground? A 75-year-old farmer takes the agricultural giant to court to find out

As David versus Goliath battles go it is hard to imagine a more uneven fight than the one about to play out in front of the US supreme court between Vernon Hugh Bowman and Monsanto.

On the one side is Bowman, a single 75-year-old Indiana soybean farmer who is still tending the same acres of land as his father before him in rural south-western Indiana. On the other is a gigantic multibillion dollar agricultural business famed for its zealous protection of its commercial rights.

Not that Bowman sees it that way. “I really don’t consider it as David and Goliath. I don’t think of it in those terms. I think of it in terms of right and wrong,” Bowman told The Guardian in an interview.

Either way, in the next few weeks Bowman and Monsanto’s opposing legal teams will face off in front of America’s most powerful legal body, weighing in on a case that deals with one of the most fundamental questions of modern industrial farming: who controls the rights to the seeds planted in the ground.

In what appears to be the most serious legal challenge to Scientology in several years, former high-level Scientologists Luis Garcia and his wife Rocio of Irvine, Calif., today filed a federal lawsuit against the Church of Scientology, alleging fraud over the way their contributions to the church were used. The suit was filed in Florida’s Middle District with the help of veteran attorneys Ted Babbitt and Ronald Weil, who plan to file additional lawsuits by other former church members.

The suit seems to come at a particularly inopportune time for Scientology as it struggles to counter a massive dose of bad publicity over the publication of Lawrence Wright’s damning history of the church, “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief.” Among other things, Wright’s book raises questions about the way Scientology leader David Miscavige has amassed wealth in the organization.

In 1993, when the Internal Revenue Service granted Scientology tax exempt status, the church was able to escape a $1 billion tax bill. But it was still held to a Supreme Court decision which required Scientology to give refunds to members who asked for them.

The Church of Scientology has strayed from principle and devolved into a cash-hungry enterprise that misuses parishioner donations to protect itself from questions and to intimidate its own members, a California couple charged Wednesday.

The couple said in a federal lawsuit that the church had misused about $400,000 of their money, including donations meant for construction projects and for relief from natural disasters.

When the Supreme Court, or any other court for that matter, makes a ruling in a case they first look for precedent, in other words to see if there has been a court decision rendered on the same subject in the past and usually defer to the old decision in ruling on the case.

The greatest teacher in life is experience; it only takes one time of burning your fingers on a hot stove to know that you never want to touch another one.

The next greatest teacher is observation, paying attention to someone else’s experiences and profiting from their wins and losses, trials and errors.

In my generation I have seen the rise and fall of fascism, communism, different experiments in socialism and the kind of downright social and fiscal foolishness that leads to what has recently happened in Greece.

2013 version National Defense Authorization Act(NDAA) did more to protect Americans against indefinite detention. We and several other news organizations reported as much yesterday.But on closer examination the new NDAA actually makes it EASIER to detain citizens indefinitely.

Here’s the added clause in question:

“Nothing in the AUMF or the 2012 NDAA shall be construed to deny the availability of the writ of habeas corpus or to deny any Constitutional rightsin a court ordained or established by or under Article III of the Constitution for any person who is lawfully in the United States when detained pursuant to the AUMF and who is otherwise entitled to the availability of such writ or such rights.”

Yesterday we focused on the line “nothing … shall be construed to deny … any constitutional Rights …”

But today we offer another interpretation from Bruce Afran, a lawyer for the group of journalists and activists suing the government over the 2012 NDAA.

Afran explained that the new provision gives U.S. citizens a right to go to civilian (i.e. Article III) court based on “any [applicable] constitutional rights,” but since there are are no rules in place to exercise this right, detained U.S. citizens currently have no way to gain access to lawyers, family or the court itself once they are detained within the military.

“The biggest thing about the [2012] NDAA was that you weren’t getting a trial … Nothing in here says that you’ll make it to an Article III court so it literally does nothing,” Dan Johnson, founder of People Against the NDAA, told BI. “It’s a bunch of words, basically,”

Afran noted that the newest version actually goes further than the NDAA that’s now in effect.

“The new statute actually states that persons lawfully in the U.S. can be detained under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force [AUMF]. The original (the statute we are fighting in court) never went that far,” Afran said. “Therefore, under the guise of supposedly adding protection to Americans, the new statute actually expands the AUMF to civilians in the U.S.”

The suit against the government challenges the indefinite detention provisions of section 1021 of the 2012 NDAA—which allow the military to indefinitely detain anyone who commits a “belligerent act” or provides “substantial support” to the Taliban, al-Qaeda or “associated forces”—on the grounds that certain terms were unconstitutionally vague and could chill free speech.

The provisions were permanently blocked by Judge Katherine Forrest but went back into effect after Appeals Court Judge Raymond Lohier reinstated them in October because he agreed with the government that section 1021 was simply a “reaffirmation” of the AUMF, which gives the president the authority to indefinitely detain anyone involved in carrying out the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The newest version of the NDAA seems to be equating the AUMF and section 1021 of the 2012 NDAA—which the government has argued all along—and thereby codifies precisely what the plaintiffs are fighting in court.

All of this makes the lawsuit—which will probably go all the way to the Supreme Court—central to the issue of the indefinite detention of Americans.

The bottom line, according to Afran, is that the NDAA “is still unconstitutional because it allows citizens or persons in the U.S. to be held in military custody, a position that the Supreme Court has repeatedly held is unconstitutional.”

Does Congress possess the constitutional power to force its citizens to purchase health insurance? Prof. Elizabeth Price Foley says that’s the key question in the Supreme Court challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court must decide whether the “individual mandate” portion of the law falls under Congress’s power to “”regulate commerce,” as enumerated by Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution.

Prof. Foley argues that whether or not you personally support the health care legislation, you should be worried about the precedent that the individual mandate would set. If the power to regulate commerce is interpreted as including the power to force people to buy something, then that power doesn’t just apply to health care. It would give Congress the power to make individuals buy anything, which poses a significant threat to individual liberty.

The formerly-gagged FBI translator-turned-whistleblower’s new memoir is ‘a masterpiece revealing corruption and unaccountability in Washington, D.C.’ and ‘a rotten barrel of toxic waste that will sooner or later infect us all’…

- Guest Blogged by David Swanson

[Ed Note: The BRAD BLOG has been reporting on the remarkable story of Sibel Edmonds since the darkest days of 2005 and in nearly 100 articles since then. Once described by the ACLU as the “the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America”, the Iranian-born former FBI translator fought to blow the whistle on traitorous deception and cover-up inside the FBI, blackmail inside the U.S. Congress and startling allegations of espionage and nuclear secrets sold to U.S. enemies on the foreign black market by some of our nation’s highest ranking officials.

In 2007, after the Supreme Court had refused to hear her case thanks to the Bush Administration’s persistent use of the so-called “State Secrets Privilege,” legendary “Pentagon Papers” whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg told The BRAD BLOG her allegations were “far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers” on the heels of her exclusive announcement on these pages that she would break her gag order to tell all to any major U.S. media outlet who would allow her a platform to do so.

Even though CBS’ 60 Minutes had covered her story in 2002 when she was not allowed to speak, they showed no interest once she promised to do so anyway, leading Ellsberg to guest blog here decrying the American media as “complicit in cover-up”. It took the UK’s Sunday Times (a Rupert Murdoch property!) to finally break some of her most explosive allegations publicly in 2008, which outed CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson would describe as “stunning”.

Finally, her 3-hour long video-taped deposition, in answer to a subpoena in someone else’s lawsuit in the summer of 2009, once Obama had come to power and declined to re-invoke the “State Secrets Privilege” against her, allowed the full story to begin to come out.

Now, after waiting more than 340 days for the FBI’s pre-clearance review of her memoir — they are supposed to do so within 30 days — Edmonds has decided to release her own story, in full, without their prior approval or redactions. We’ve now got our own copy of her new book, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story, but our colleague, author and activist David Swanson has happily beaten us to reading it in full and has generously offered us his own review which follows below. – BF]

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Sibel Edmonds’ new book, Classified Woman, is like an FBI file on the FBI, only without the incompetence.

The experiences she recounts resemble K.’s trip to the castle, as told by Franz Kafka, only without the pleasantness and humanity.

I’ve read a million reviews of nonfiction books about our government that referred to them as “page-turners” and “gripping dramas,” but I had never read a book that actually fit that description until now…

The F.B.I., the Justice Department, the White House, the Congress, the courts, the media, and the nonprofit industrial complex put Sibel Edmonds through hell. This book is her triumph over it all, and part of her contribution toward fixing the problems she uncovered and lived through.

Edmonds took a job as a translator at the FBI shortly after 9-11. She considered it her duty. Her goal was to prevent any more terrorist attacks. That’s where her thinking was at the time, although it has now changed dramatically. It’s rarely the people who sign up for a paycheck and healthcare who end up resisting or blowing a whistle.

Edmonds found at the FBI translation unit almost entirely two types of people. The first group was corrupt sociopaths, foreign spies, cheats and schemers indifferent to or working against U.S. national security. The second group was fearful bureaucrats unwilling to make waves.